Reflections, Observations, and Analyses Pertaining to the Canadian Political Scene

Friday, September 8, 2017

Simply Shameful

The other day I noted the difference between Canadian and American coverage of natural disasters. Canadian news does not shy away from references to, and analyses of, climate change, while American news, doubtlessly due to corporate decree, treats it as a theoretical/ideological/political construct not to be mentioned. Apparently, not running afoul of the powers-that-be and influential network sponsors takes precedence over the truth.

If you go to the three-minute mark of the following NBC Nightly News report, Al Roker gives Lester Holt his morally bankrupt version of the meteorological facts of life.

I wonder if 2017 will become the year that Americans will recall, saying "we were warned." The northeast got off lightest with cold weather and flooding. The southeast and Gulf coasts endured drought, heatwaves and then massive hurricanes. Tornadoes wracked the southern states. Drought and heatwaves led to massive wildfires from Mexico to Alaska while the Great Plains were hit by crop-killing flash drought, drought compounded by sustained heatwaves. It's hard to come up with a part of that country that hasn't been hammered by climate change - severe weather events of increasing intensity, frequency and duration.

How much dislocation can the US sustain before the cracks emerge in its atrophied foundation? It's a society built on and now dependent upon maximums, everything taken to the limit, fully loaded and stressed.

Even resilience has been discarded as an unacceptable cost. A perfect example is "just in time" industrialism where the manufacturer doesn't maintain stocks of essential components but relies on its suppliers to deliver what's needed precisely when it's needed. Everything becomes hyper-vulnerable to disruption in delivery of hundreds of essential components. Any one of those components goes down and the whole business is derailed - the risk built in for the sake of the smallest extra dollop of profit. Penny wise and pound foolish.

It's hard to be sympathetic to America's plight given the degree to which the US has contributed to global warming and the murderous impacts that is already causing in distant corners of the world where the poorest and most vulnerable people are already being uprooted, forced to migrate, or, in increasing numbers, simply being killed off.

Meanwhile our own governments, federal and provincial, are doing everything they can to maximize the extraction, transmission and export of the filthiest, highest-carbon ersatz petroleum on the planet. That should remind us that it's not just the Americans who are driving that suffering and death.

Points all well-taken, Mound. No country in the developed world gets a pass on this increasingly dire situation, but the U.S., because of its former leadership role in the world and its current commitment to do nothing about climate change, must come in for special censure.